Waiting for Godot to Leave

At one point I took all of these posts down, because I felt I had been far too willingly brainwashed into a religious system that was doing more harm than good.   But, lately, I decided to republish some of the more interesting posts.  What follows is about ten percent of what I posted from 2007 to 2021.  They are in an odd chronological order, becuase Blogger is a clunky. Meanwhile, you can find my more sane (and more recent) musings here -  https://theateroftheword.substack.com .

For those of you who know me from EWTN, the Society of GK Chesterton, the Prairie Troubadours or The St. Austin Review, I am no longer affiliated with any of those groups. "The truth will set you free" ( John 8:32 ) "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." ( John 18:37 ) If we deny the truth, we are bad Christians and bad human beings. If we put our faith in a lie - including a Big Lie - we are bad Christians and bad human beings. If we endorse vulgarity, violence, bullying, gaslighting, fraud, irrational conspiracy theories, sedition and hate, we are bad Christians and bad human beings. Since March of 2020, I have felt like a character in the play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco.  In that play, the bestial inhumanity of rhinoceroses becomes a fad and people start turning into them - willingly discarding reason and free will and mocking others who don...

... from The St. Louis Review ... August 8, 2008 ‘Journey of St. Paul’ to bring apostle to life on local stage by Jennifer Brinker, Review Staff Writer -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SAINTLY PRODUCTION - Theater of the Word founder Kevin O'Brien portrays St. Paul in upcoming performances of 'The Journey of St. Paul.' Want to learn more about St. Paul the Apostle? Theater of the Word, a local Catholic theater production company, is offering to archdiocesan parishes performances of "The Journey of St. Paul," to coincide with the Year of St. Paul designated by Pope Benedict XVI. Presentations will be offered to parishes for free, with donations accepted, said Theater of the Word founder Kevin O’Brien. "Our main focus is to evangelize, to share the word of St. Paul and to let people know who we are," he said. Theater of the Word launched its inaugural season last year at the Cardinal Rigali Center in Shrewsb...

By popular demand, here is an article I wrote for my Upstage Productions Murder Mystery Newsletter in May of 2000. I am not making it up. As I’ve boasted in previous newsletters, we were invited to perform for what I was told were a group of “top HBO producers” at the Belhurst Castle in Geneva, New York in April. The HBO folks wanted me to do a parody of “The Sopranos”, their fascinating, violent, vulgar, and addictive hit drama series, which features what we kindly call the “F word” as a mainstay adjective. And so I set to work writing a parody of the show and faxed it off to HBO. They called me in March. “We really are happy to be working with you on this project,” they told me, “but we feel your script is a little … vulgar.” This is because in the first act, Tony introduces Uncle Junior, his 87 year old uncle, and Uncle Junior uses the “F word” literally 17 times in his first speech. To which Tony replies, “Uncle Junior, ever since you got cable, you been a real pain in the ass...

Last week my actors and I had a great time in Evansville, Indiana with Bill Baer, creative writing professor at the University of Evansville and founder of The Southwell Institute (Bill is third from left in the photo below.) I told Bill about my latest post re. HBO and The Sopranos and he told me the story of how his brother helped create and develop The Sopranos , but was never paid for it, and eventually sued the producer of the series. This made me tell the story of how I'm pretty sure I helped create The Simpsons , TV's longest running cartoon situation comedy. This is all true and I am not making any of it up. The story begins in the late 1970's, when I began writing and drawing a comic strip about a real-life St. Louis family that I knew as acquaintances. I turned them, in my strip, into a horrifically dysfunctional group of people, giving them bizarre and vulgar adventures in the rich St. Louis suburbs. The family consisted of a father named Homer, whom I made b...

A reader of Mark Shea's blog tells of a priest who was tortured to death via "the water cure". He links to an article in the New York Times from 1903, in which some great things stand out in a quote attributed to Judge Advocate General George B. Davis, who said, (107 years ago) ... " No modern State , which is a party to international law, can sanction either expressly or by a silence, which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view of obtaining confessions as an incident to its military operations. If it does, where is the line to be drawn? If the 'water cure' is ineffective, what shall be the next step? Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smoldering fire; shall he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet? Shall he be beaten with rods? Shall his shins be rubbed with a broomstick until they bleed? For all these, and more, have been done during the Spanish domination in the Philippine Islands, a...

This morning I noticed three unauthorized charges had gone through our home banking account within the last twenty-four hours via our debit card, totaling just under $50. The payments were made to Skype, the internet telephone service. Now I knew I had signed up for Skype, but I signed up for the free service, not the paid service, and I never would have given them our debit card number even if I had agreed to pay them anything. In addition, we’ve never even used Skype. The program languishes on our upstairs computer. But when you visit Skype’s website, they make it impossible for you to cancel your account (especially when you haven’t paid), and they give you no opportunity to contact them directly. The company seems to be based out of Luxembourg, and they provide no phone number for customer service or for billing errors. A quick Google of “Skype billing fraud” turns up over 70,000 sites, and the top of the list is Skype’s own forum, where users have been complaining about what I...

“I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. This is hard for readers to grasp, for O’Connor’s stories are so shocking, violent, and disturbing that we wonder how they can be about grace. This is because we see grace as being a “nice thing”, like quietly saying grace before meals, like the “graceful” moves of a figure skater, like the “social graces”, which are about soothing and calming people and situations. We really believe the message of all the Scriptures is “Jesus was nice; you be nice, too.” But the Grace of God is a man clothed in rags with a wild gleam in his eye eating locusts in the desert and warning his people to flee from the wrath to come. The Grace of God is the zeal of Phineas, who slew the Israelite and his wife who were flaunting God’s commands. The Grace of God is St. Paul, blinded, knocked down, humiliated. When the hand of God reaches o...

This is part one of what will be posted in two parts on The St. Austin Review Ink Desk . The Beast Advances or The Attack on Reason by Kevin O'Brien Hilaire Belloc, in “The Great Heresies”, pointed to a disturbing feature of the Modern Attack on the Catholic Church: the attack upon Reason. Nowhere is this more clearly displayed than on the internet - yes, on Facebook in particular, but also everywhere on the internet. And though I have written about Facebook before and my on-again off-again love-hate relationship with her, I’m beginning to see that the enemy is not Facebook. The enemy is us! Let me try to categorize the problems I’ve noticed: 1. BEING FORCED TO EXPLAIN THE PUNCHLINE A friend of mine on Facebook can not post even innocuous quotations such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s, “The Saints are the Sinners who keep on trying,” without a barrage of comment box (combox) attacks nitpicking at all sorts of things the quote never intended to convey. In this case, comment...

On the St. Austin Review Ink Desk, Sophia Mason has written an post in which she both pans and praises Facebook. How I empathize with Sophia! As regular readers know, Facebook and I have had a tumultuous relationship. She and I have split a few times after ugly public shouting matches, she pushed me down the stairs once, I have accused her of infidelity, her algorithm had originally sized me up as a loser and drug abuser simply because I was an actor, and so forth. But we’ve settled into something rather permanent of late. Facebook and I are not exactly “married”, nor “single”, we are “in a relationship” and “it’s complicated”. So I do indeed empathize with Ms. Mason over her tendency to love / hate this thing called Facebook. But how much is Facebook as a mode of communication to blame for Facebook’s shortcomings? As the internet blogger Dr. Thursday pointed out to me once, “Objecting to the internet is like objecting to a road or a highway. The internet is simply a pathway to a ...

There is awash in the world today a kind of idealism that’s loosed from its moorings. I suspect this is because the cynicism against which the idealism reacts is so strong and entrenched that it’s provoking reactions that are unrealistic. A case in point is James O’Keefe, a young man who spoke at this year’s American Chesterton Society Conference. O’Keefe is best known as the video journalist who brought down ACORN and who exposed the racism inherent in Planned Parenthood’s abortion agenda by means of undercover videos in which he posed as a pimp or a racist, and elicited responses that were shocking enough to cause a few tremors. He struck us at the Conference as a quixotic idealist carrying on against the windmills of corruption while under assault from the mainstream media, lawyers and other nasty bugbears. However, it was a bit disturbing when, in the Q & A session following his speech, O’Keefe was asked, “How do you justify your technique? You lie to people in your undercover ...

First, I was given the great privilege of recording the official audio version of the Holy Father's new book, Light of the World as published by Ignatius Press, which can be ordered on audio CD or downloaded here . And I said two weeks ago to Jim Morlino , my co-reader for the audio book, "The Pope's comments about condoms will be the comments the press will run with." It did not take much prophetic insight to predict that. The situation is simple: All the Holy Father is saying is that if a man who is steeped in sin to begin with and is having sex for reasons contrary to God's will and the Natural Law, then if this particular man begins to have a pang of conscience that says, "Perhaps getting physical pleasure is not what this is all about. Perhaps I should be concerned about my partner here. Maybe I should use a condom so as to protect my partner from the ravages of disease," this is clearly (as charity and common sense will tell you) a movement in...

The word is “unreal”. I had been looking for this word for a long time. You see, we have a few odd linguistic quirks here in St. Louis, where I live. For one thing, we use the word “hoosier” to mean “urban white trash” – the only place on earth where you’ll find this word used in this way. And when I was growing up we used to use the word “fruit” to mean not what “gay” means now, but to mean “contrived, artificial, self-indulgent in a stupid way”. For instance, the music of Marty Haugen is “fruit”. Catholic Schools Week is “fruit”. Movies on the Hallmark Channel are “fruit”. And for a long time this was the only word I could use to describe what was wrong in the Catholic Church. I had come into the Church having been inspired by the writings of G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and so by the time I was Catholic and regularly attending Mass and sending my kids to the parish school and especially after experiencing nine months of purgatory with our RCIA non-faith non-formation no...

We've been talking much lately about "intentional disciples" and of the need for parishes to foster "true discipleship", to encourage the formation of capital D Disciples and not just neo-pagan lukewarm modernists disguised as Christians. The problem is Wormwood pulls up a pew and says to us, in his cloying and flattering tone, "According to most pastors, only five percent of all their parishioners are serious about following Christ. You're one of those. You're a capital-D Disciple. You're an intentional Disciple. You're a true Disciple. These fat church ladies with their pot luck dinners and their parish picnics, they're not even Christians in any meaningful sense of the word. Look at that chubby grocer in the pew beside you. He nods off during the homilies. He's not a True Disciple. Look at that pierced kid at the Teen Mass, with glowing hair and a condom in his pocket. He's not a True Disciple. But you are! You ma...

Yesterday I posted what ended up being my most controversial post in two years on Facebook. It was simply a quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “A good intention (for example, that of helping one’s neighbor) does not make behavior that is intrinsically disordered, such as lying and calumny [slander], good or just. The end does not justify the means” (CCC 1753). In less than 24 hours, this post has generated 138 comments. Some of them from conservative Catholics who are angry at what the Church teaches. Now, seeing that, and knowing what a firestorm we're in on the internet over this issue, I would like to summarize a few things and then make a new point. The issue has arisen over the undercover video sting techniques of James O'Keefe and Lila Rose, aimed at exposing Planned Parenthood. This is a highly charged issue, as it appears to many people that Lila and James are being attacked or judged; it appears as if the voices of caution are standing in the way of ...

MRS. WASHINGTON: George, did you chop down that cherry tree? GEORGE: I can not tell a lie. Then again, maybe I can. How authoritative are the teachings in the Catechism? Aren't there conflicting traditions on this? Doesn't Scriptue itself encourage lying? Isn't the whole issue just too much for a common man to grasp? Let me get back to you on that, Mom.

OK, here we go. Sean Dailey has made this case in the Gilbert Editorial despite my telling him he was going to far, but he was right and I was wrong. Here's Sean's latest comment at the ACS website: *** Finally, the worst part of Live Action’s lies is that those lies had the effect of leading the Planned Parenthood workers deeper into sin, of undermining their-God given free will to choose good, if given the opportunity. CCC 2489 speaks of “charity and respect for the truth.” Yes, now we know that Planned Parenthood aids and abets teen prostitution and teen abortion and contraception. Is it really any surprise? In other news, water found to be wet. But if the Live Action actors had entered the PP facilities with “charity and respect for the truth” in their hearts, rather than intending to commit evil so good may come from it, how much more might they have accomplished? Could they maybe have converted a soul or two? As I wrote in my editorial, we are called to be salt and light...

This is from the website of the Society of Our Lady of the Trinity . Official SOLT Statement Regarding Fr John Corapi As the Regional Priest Servant of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity (SOLT), I issue the following statement on behalf of the Society. On 16 March 2011, the Bishop of Corpus Christi, Texas, and the SOLT received a complaint against Fr. John Corapi, SOLT. As is normal procedure and due to the gravity of the accusation alleging conduct not in concert with the priestly state or his promises as a member of a society of apostolic life of diocesan right, Fr. Corapi was suspended from active ministry (put on administrative leave) until such a time that the complaint could be fully investigated and due process given to Fr. Corapi. In the midst of the investigation, the SOLT received a letter from Fr. Corapi, dated June 3, 2011, indicating that, because of the physical, emotional and spiritual distress he has endured over the past few years, he could no longer cont...

His latest video slamming bloggers who are critical of Fr. Corapi is slanderous and insipid. In the past I've only made fun of his hair. To imply that he is above the fray because he's not a "professional Catholic on the internet" (which is exactly what he is, as he claims we are) is absurd. He has slammed me and all of you who love Christ and His Church and who are upset about the hypocrisy of Fr. Corapi and Father's abandonment of his priesthood, Father's frustrating the investigation against him, and Father's slander of his bishop. Let's just say this: if we are partisan enough to support this Voris and his "Real Catholic TV" (and his hair), if we are partisan enough blindly to defend Fr. Corapi after he has shown that he's a disturbed personality at least and an outright fraud at best, if we are partisan enough that we consider ourselves Vorisians or Corapians rather than Christians, than all this is mere politics and to hell with ...

A friend of mine was living in Chicago and he was miserable. Not because of the Cubs. And not because of toll booths. And not because of the winters! He was miserable because he wasn't famous. He was slaving away auditioning everywhere and doing some sort of comedy improv thing on local access cable TV and he was angry and sore that nobody noticed him. His whole life was focused on getting noticed! getting seen! getting famous! And this is what happens to actors when they forget that it's not all about them. It's about the work. But before I say that again, let's examine the question of The Meaning of Life Earlier this week we had a backyard meeting of the ChesterBelloc Drinking and Debating Club, my men's only group that sits around discussing philosophy, life, religion, while arguing and drinking. Two of our members have tremendous faith - not faith in God, but faith in Evolution as the Answer to all Questions. I finally got one of them (my favorite atheist, Stev...